Newspapers

When The New York Post published its absurd cover the other day calling the alleged victim in the Greg Kelly rape claim a “rape beauty,” people were upset, but sort of brushed it aside because it’s the Post, and they do stupid crap all the time.

Somehow, The New York Observer didn’t think leaving the situation alone was an appropriate response, and instead called Kelly a “rape stud” in a headline on its website today. As Azi Paybarah, a politics writer for Capital New York points out on his blog, the headline has since been taken down. David Freelander, a reporter for the Observer, said the headline was “cross-posted from another NYO blog w/out our OK.”

The new headline simply reads, “Greg Kelly’s Triumphant Return to Good Day New York.” Probably should’ve just went with that in the beginning.

[Photo via Paybarah's blog]

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This is the first issue of The Wall Street Journal. It was published on July 8, 1889, and you could get a copy for two cents. According to the Speakeasy, the first issue was four pages long.

It’s a little blurry, but we can see that there are several stories on the “markets,” and one headline that reads, “Bankers Exerting Their Powers.” Not much has changed in 122 years, has it?

Michael Wolff , writing for The Guardian, says that Bloomberg and Reuters are both competing to acquire The Financial Times. A ”senior executive” at Reuters told Wolff that FT had recently turned down an offer from Bloomberg, but it was “in clear discussions” with Reuters.

Wolff explains that gaining the paper would make sense for either company:

It is certainly true that neither Bloomberg nor Thomson Reuters need a newspaper — and yet it is true, too, that it could change the game were one of them to get a major financial news organ (so much so that each would probably do what is necessary to try to prevent the other from getting one — vastly enhancing the value of both the FT and WSJ). Indeed, while neither Pearson nor News Corp are ever going to turn the FT or WSJ into significant earners, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters, with their back-end financial information resources, might be able to build a powerful and profitable financial news front end.

He does concede that because the talks are — according to his source — “at an informal level of discussion,” any deal might be far off.

UPDATE:
A Pearson spokesperson emailed us and denied the rumors. ”The FT is a very valued and valuable part of Pearson,” wrote the spokesperson. “It is not for sale.”

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Newspapers offering buyouts is beginning to become quite common. The latest to offer staffers a paid way out the door is The Washington Post, which has offered buyouts in the past. Per a memo from Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, only a limited amount of people will be able to accept the offer, since WaPo can “absorb staffing changes better in some areas than in others.”

The announcement unfortunately comes the same day as this Forbes story, which details how WaPo missed out on becoming one of the earliest investors in Facebook. That’s some bad timing.

More from the memo, which was obtained by Jim Romenesko:

In those departments where we do offer the buyout, there will be caps on the number of people who can participate, in order to moderate the impact and preserve our competitiveness in core coverage areas. In addition, we may turn down some volunteers if we feel their departure would impair our journalism. That said, it is important that we achieve real savings.

Any measure like this is difficult. But we believe this approach is a sensible and effective way of addressing the economic forces affecting our industry.

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Karl Lagerfeld has guest-edited Metro World News for some reason, and of course he had to chime in on recent headlines — including a new Newsweek article that painted him as overrated. As always, Lagerfeld’s comments were weird as hell. He told Metro that he didn’t appreciate the article, and since he had never heard of the writer, the piece was obviously crap.

Then he moved on to his thoughts on Tina Brown. “I feel sorry for Tina Brown that her paper is really going down,” said Lagerfeld. “It’s so skinny, it’s really what we call a ‘diet issue’ because it has no advertising and she certainly will not get advertising with this kind of article.”

The “we” he refers to must be all his friends who sit around and discuss magazine ad sales. We hear their gatherings can get quite rowdy.

Lagerfeld wasn’t finished there. He called Adele “too fat,” Russian men “very ugly,” said that he never votes because he knows too much about the political world and insisted that Michelle Obama once asked a designer why he didn’t “like her big black ass.”

We have nothing further to add.

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